Ignorance is...Ignorance

This morning, Bears’ president Kevin Warren announced the team’s focus for a new stadium has shifted back to Chicago, the lakefront to be exact and just south of their current home at that. Wait, there’s more. As quoted in today’s The Athletic, Warren exhibited one shaky grasp on Chicago history. “It will set this city up for greatness for the next 100 years,” he said from Orlando, where NFL owners are meeting. “If you go back and look at the Daniel Burnham [P]lan from 1932, you’re talking about a vision. He set the vision for the World’s Fair.” Where to start? How’s this: The Burnham Plan dates to 1909, not 1932. And his mention of the 1933 World’s Fair amounts to gibberish. Yes, the fair was centered around Northerly Island, and Burnham called for the creation of a series of such offshore islands, but how somebody who died in 1912 set the “vision” for a world’s fair twenty-one years later is beyond me. And last time I read the Plan—can you say that, Kevin?—Burnham didn’t mention anything about a World’s Fair. I also happen to have a book about the Century of Progress done as kind of coffee-table book. It notes a connection between the Burnham Plan and the “City Beautiful” movement, with the fair connected to Burnham through a couple of degrees of separation. But you have to take time to read the text carefully. Otherwise, you’re bound to say something wrong. Warren also called the lakefront area around the museum campus the “most beautiful piece of property in the country.” Yeah, and the Bears don’t own it. The people of Chicago do, and they shouldn’t give it away to a bunch of grifting Munsters.